How do you fetch all documents (including non-existent ancestor documents) in a Firebase collection?

Question

I am trying to pull all the documents in the collection \'users\', but it only pulls \'fred\' and \'lisa\', and ignores all the italicized documents:

For this data:<

Answer 1

If you're trying to list all your registered users from Firebase auth, you can use the Firebase SDK function:

    function listAllUsers(nextPageToken) {
      admin.auth().listUsers(1000, nextPageToken)
        .then(function(listUsersResult){
          listUsersResult.users.forEach(function(userRecord) {
            console.log('user', userRecord.toJSON());
          })
          if (listUsersResult.pageToken) {
            // list next batch of users
          }
        })
        .catch(function(err) {
          console.log('Error listing users: ', error)
        });
    }

    listAllUsers();

via http://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/manage-users#list_all_users

Answer 2

As you have mentioned, these "documents" are displayed with an italic font in the Firebase console: this is because these documents are only present (in the console) as "container" of one or more sub-collection but they are not "genuine" documents.

As matter of fact, if you create a document directly under a col1 collection with the full path doc1/subCol1/subDoc1, no intermediate documents will be created (i.e. no doc1 document).

The Firebase console shows this kind of "container" (or "placeholder") in italics in order to "materialize" the hierarchy and allow you to navigate to the subDoc1 document but doc1 document doesn't exist in the Firestore database.

Let's take an example: Imagine a doc1 document under the col1 collection

col1/doc1/

and another one subDoc1 under the subCol1 (sub-)collection

col1/doc1/subCol1/subDoc1

Actually, from a technical perspective, they are not at all relating to each other. They just share a part of their path but nothing else. One side effect of this is that if you delete a document, its sub-collection(s) still exist.

So, if you want to be able to query for these parent documents, you will have to create them yourself, as jackz314 mentioned in the comments.